Southern Culture On the Skids

Generally speaking, inviting a guy who
goes by the name “Killer Joe” into your home is a spectacularly unwise
idea. Then again, the characters populating this unhinged slice of
depravity from William Friedkin could never be mistaken for Rhodes
scholars, or even elementary-school graduates. They are breathlessly
stupid people snared in a web of their own stupid decisions, and
Friedkin shows them no pity. He is particularly malicious toward Emile
Hirsch’s trailer-park drug dealer, a deep-in-debt Texas lowlife who
hatches a woefully ill-conceived plot to murder his mother and collect
her life insurance.

In
the span of about 20 minutes, Hirsch has the crap kicked out of him by
mob enforcers, a gun shoved in his face by a naked Matthew McConaughey,
and his skull nearly caved in via repeated blows to the head with a can
of pie filling. But the director saves his greatest act of degradation
for Gina Gershon. Let’s just say KFC stock is likely to plummet in its
wake.

At age 77, Friedkin
has ceased giving any semblance of a fuck. Such depreciation of regard
for social decorum is common in folks who reach a certain advanced age.
For the average senior citizen, it might manifest in, say, a tendency to
back out of driveways without looking. In Friedkin’s case, it means
making a movie like Killer Joe.

Adapted from a play
by Tracy Letts, who wrote the screenplay, it is maybe the most
skin-crawlingly nasty picture to come from a major American director
since David Lynch’s Blue Velvet. Set against the burnt-out
landscape of the American Southwest, in an unnamed town on the outskirts
of Dallas, it indulges in the ugliest of “white trash” stereotypes.
Gawking at one clan of slack-jawed, dirt-poor rednecks in particular,
the movie wrings scum-black humor from yokels hee-hawing at televised
monster truck rallies and attending funerals dressed in ripped suits and
baseball caps. So mentally and morally destitute are they that a
contract killer with a fried-chicken fetish comes off looking virtuous.
He’s been hired to snuff out the family matriarch, but Friedkin has
condemned them all to death, in a climax wet with blood and sexual
brutality. Then, in a final twisted joke, he fades to black and cues up
Clarence Carter’s hysterically horny “Strokin’.”

If Killer Joe
were the product of a younger filmmaker, the cruelty and condescension
would translate as desperately attention-seeking. But Friedkin has been
pushing, prodding and provoking audiences for decades. If the
provocation seems emptier here, that’s because he has lived long enough
to cast off the burden of restraint. Killer Joe has no underlying
message to leaven and redeem the violence and perversion. It only has
the visceral charge of a master shit-disturber going all-in on his
basest instincts. As a primal gut-punch, the movie can’t be called
anything other than a success. It’s disgusting, but just try looking
away. You can’t.

Let’s not
misrepresent the film: It isn’t torture porn. While much of its imagery
is certainly gratuitous—Gershon’s pubic hair appears before she does—the
film earned its NC-17 rating more for how icky it feels than anything
it depicts. Even if Friedkin edited out Hirsch’s bludgeoning or that
queasy scene with the chicken drumstick, the movie still would’ve been
slapped with that damning rating for McConaughey’s performance alone. He
finds his best role yet as the titular Joe—lawman by day, hitman by
night, intangibly frightening always. He slithers across the screen
draped in leather, his mouth agape, hiding derangement behind a cloak of gentility. Eventually, he wraps himself around Juno Temple, the movie’s lone symbol of virginal innocence, in a scene that ends up only the second-most disturbing in the film. McConaughey gives himself over so completely to sleaziness that, like Killer Joe itself, you can’t help but admire him for it.